Partagas Chicos

I have been looking around for these, not to smoke, but to keep a handle on whether or not they remain in production.  Smoked one last night that was really great.  It smoked much more like a small cigar than a machine made mini cigar, or cigarillo I guess.  The flavor was deep and musty with a interesting hybrid of vanilla and bleach.  I know this is a disgusting thought, but two things bring about this "taste-vor".  In my first job ever, I had to clean out coolers that housed racks of plastic bins with hundreds of pounds of raw chicken.  We used wooden pallets to raise the floor level and would cover the floor of the cooler with a mixture of vanilla extract and bleach.  Nice, huh?  Not my rules or my concoction.  But at times the flavor has very positive connotations.  I guess the bleach whiff could be also called menthol, but the notes of vanilla steer my mind to other origins.  This is a cut filler cigar which requires ashing almost as much as a cigarette, but the flavor is quite intense and enjoyable. 

These are narrow ring gauge smokes about the size of a "100's" cigarette, and yet even after 8 years in a box (in cello), they retain a massive flavor appeal.  Really strong and delicious.  Certainly a pleasant surprise on a night when I was not going to smoke anything.  With notes of black tobacco and pepper, white pepper and  roasted meat, this was a really complex cigar for a machine made product.  But that can be the nature of the cut filler beast.  At any given puff, there could be a piece of ligero chopped from the end of a Esplendido or a Edicion Limitada of the choicest kind.

I only needed to devote 25 minutes to it, and if I had nubbed it and burned my fingers, it would have lasted 35 minutes easily.  Now for the hard part.  You would have a nearly impossible time finding these anywhere.  I am sure there are brick and mortar stores that have them, but online these are a tough find.  Hell, anything online is a tough find these days after the thing that shall not be named.  I am not saying go right out and get some now.  You either have them or you don't.  I also tend to THINK that these are rolled near the end of the handmade run when there is little left to roll but that which a macine can use.  This is not a review with a strong BUY BUY BUY at the end.  Just a warning that if you DO see em available, snap up a box or a five pack.  Bearing in mind that these are machine made cigars, and not to be thought of in terms of normal scoring, I give last nights edition, nearly black and covered in dots of plume, a solid 85.